It has been a bit more than a month since the last email so it is time to give a new update on the production and delivery schedule. Seeed Studio was kind enough to give me some precise informations.
To sum up:
📈 More than 300 units have already been shipped. I would not say that this initial production was plain sailing. In fact, I had to provide a guide to fix some production problems in the very first batch.I want to thank all the people that took the time to share the experiences on the process and helped make the guide more precise for the rest.
Sorry for this new email, but several people wrote to ask for clarifications, which makes it obvious that I was not precise enough in my last email.
Price increase only impacts future orders. If you already ordered there is no action expected from you.
The uncertainty around US-Chinese trading rules explained the priority given to send stock to the US warehouse. Seeed Studio also has EU warehouse and it is expected that the minichord will be available here in the medium term. I’ll inquire to be able to provide more precise estimate in the next update!
As you may remember, the last newsletter issue announced the official commercialisation of the minichord.
In retrospect, the timing could not have been worse: it came right as the tariffs between USA and China were starting to increase, creating a lot of uncertainty both for potential US buyers, but also for the project itself, as it relies on a US-made microcontroller that was the target of the reciprocal tariffs.
To respond to those rising costs, Seeed Studio had no choice but to augment the minichord price to $169, and even with this augmentation had issue to foresee how the project could keep making sense economically.
This update is probably the most expected: today Seeed Studio is officially opening orders for the minichord 🎉 🎉 🎉
The team at Seeed Studio worked hard to be able to offer the minichord as soon as possible and answer the many requests the I received. It will be available in a clean black and white colour scheme, for a retail price of $129. An initial batch has been manufactured then, depending on the volume of orders, more will fabricated month by month 📈.
To be able to attain that attractive price, some trade-offs had to be made regarding the marking of the buttons: while I CNC engraved them, this method was not scalable at a reasonable price. Seeed Studio had to use stickers instead. Also initially there will be only one colour available. I’ll circulate a poll in the coming weeks to identify the most wanted color schemes for future batches. In any case, minichords are easy to customise if you have a very specific color scheme in mind 🌈 !
With the production of the minichord taking shape, it is time for me to give a brief update on the project advancement 🗓️.
I have just received pre-production circuit boards from SeeedStudio and could confirm that they are perfectly functional 🎉. This is an important step towards release, and gives me great confidence in our ability to put the minichord on sale soon. There is still a few unknowns which could affect the release date or the final price, but less and less everyday.
In addition, I built and sent close to 15 minichords to artists around the world to beta test the project 🎸🎹. I got an overwhelming positive response and some useful feedbacks. Some of them were kind enough to record short videos of them using the minichord [1][2][3]. Even more kind, Hainbach published a video of the project, which, as a long time fan of his channel was a great honour 🤩.
As the year is coming to an end, here is some update on the minichord project. The bad news is that it won't be ready for the holidays, but the good news is that it is moving forward 🎉
Thanks to the incredible support, Seeedstudio was convinced to have a look at it and I am happy to announce that they received my prototypes and are currently assessing their capability to manufacture the minichord.
In addition, I've kept adding features, as you can see in the changelog at the end of this communication. The most important one is of course MIDI support!
